Comment by maratc
2 days ago
The amount of fascination that people have with these "grammar nazi" bots -- some of them implementing completely arbitrary "rules" and some of them disagreeing with others on what "good" Python code should look like -- doesn't stop to amaze me.
Here's "bad" code:
important_numbers = {
'x': 3,
'y': 42, # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
'z': 2
}
Here's what "good" code should look like:
important_numbers = {"x": 3, "y": 42, "z": 2} # Answer to the Ultimate Question!
Which completely misses the writer's intent. But did you notice that there are two spaces before the pound now? Also, the quotes are now double because apparently it's somehow more kosher! So much improvement!
The actual problems in the code I work with are not the spaces at the end of line or imports in non-alphabetic order, it's the 10-line list comprehensions that are so long that they're impossible for me to parse. None of these tools catch that. My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change. All that energy could be better spent elsewhere.
The point of the "grammar nazi" bots is to focus on the actual problems: if a bot is deciding about linting, you don't have to waste brain power to discuss it in PRs.
It is what it is, everyone gets the same, shut up and work on what matters.
I'm surprised you consider it a lot of energy spent, I tend not to spend any on this, it just runs automatically on my code and I drop out of pretty much every discussions about linting as it's good enough with automated tools.
I also used to work in places where there was no such tools, and there I had to actually spend time discussing and thinking about linting.
In my previous place, discussions on coding style were forbidden in PRs. It worked just fine.
Edit: one could also use single or double quotes in strings, and it didn't anger the grammar nazi bots as there were none.
Which gets rid of the discussion, but not the problem coding style rules are supposed to fix: Code looks the same, regardless of who wrote it. That's the whole point of code style guidelines like that as there's no functional reason for them.
That's why I like Go, every piece of code looks the same, there's one default enforced linter and this discussion (or discussion if discussion should be allowed or prohibited) doesn't even cross anyones mind.
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Using a consistent string delimiter has value: if you search for ['foo'] you will find all instances of the string foo. With inconsistent delimiters, you better have a single canonical 'foo' in your project or you're going to run into problems.
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I would hate to work on that codebase. We learn to parse code more quickly over years of looking at code written with the same conventions and style. There’s a reason why Google are so serious about following their style guides.
Even better: if someone feels like the syntax must be different, they can pick it up at a centralized repository with more people that specialize in syntax.
Afterwards it will affect production code everywhere on the planet. :)
This is the way, and why I wrote https://pypi.org/project/ssort/. Unfortunately you need to follow it up with shameless self-promotion or it doesn't work.
>The point of the "grammar nazi" bots is to focus on the actual problems: if a bot is deciding about linting, you don't have to waste brain power to discuss it in PRs.
And yet, as per the example, the bot force worse linting decisions, and even pushes towards more bugs (e.g. future readers missing the comment intention since it now applies to all 3).
the claim we are arguing here is not that “linters never make mistakes” it is that “linters are generally beneficial and avoid mostly useless debates we previously spent an inordinate amount of time on” Most linters have an escape hatch for exactly this which is usually a one line disable comment
There is no point discussing these minutia, ever. Just ban discussing them in PRs and then you don't need an opinionated bot rife with false positives to "fix" them.
And yet, a new argument surfaces about whether or not the linking should take place. Some people just like to argue :)
Dunno, now the workflow is like agent makes code changes, ruff complains, agent fixes complaints at the cost of code bloat, agent makes a PR, another agent reviews the PR, agent makes changes, PR is approved and merged. Nobody reads PRs anymore with the agentic development velocity.
> Nobody reads PRs anymore with the agentic development velocity.
Tokens are burnt, that's the most important part. And with more of the generated shitty code there will be more tokens spent in the future.
I've never had discussions about code formatting in PRs, this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career.
It's not by accident that tabs vs spaces is one of the stereotypical great debates in programming.
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> something that predates my career
That's because everybody uses linters nowadays, which was the original point.
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I've made comments if the formatting is egregious enough. This is a "bigger problem" in not-python, languages without significant whitespace. You can truly write some horrifying code that will compile just fine.
These used to happen all the time. In one (otherwise great) programming course in university you would even get points subtracted if you did not follow the lecturer's preferred style.
(I think that in their case it was partially because uniformity made correcting faster.)
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Silicon Valley (the TV show) memed about it with its tabs vs spaces bit. It used to be a thing for sure. It has been a good 10 or 15 years since I had such a discussion. Automated linting and formatting tools largely killed it in my experience.
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> this seems like a made up problem or something that predates my career
I can believe the latter, and I can assure you this was a Big Deal back in the day. There's a reason Go ships with gofmt, and gofmt was somewhat revolutionary for being a built-in "you gotta do it like this" back in the day.
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I've read through all the sub-comments you've left here.
In short, you seem to have a grievance against linters that goes way past reasonable. You assert this example you give is "perfect" below. You also complain linters waste time and commits despite able evidence in the field they do the opposite.
You seem willing to add drama, grievance, and personal bias to what could have been a rather straightforward technical discussion. The sum of which is: linters sometimes make changes to code that I don't like.
I'd encourage you to reconsider what's really important when it comes to team development and try listening more to those around you. You seem overly focused on asserting your opinion instead of having a discussion.
These types of exchanges are usually very unproductive and stressful in a team environment. They are evidence, IMO, of a dev having the wrong priorities. I'd encourage you to step back and really consider how you view craftsmanship in a team dynamic and whether or not you are fighting the right battles.
There are some really bad linters out there like Rubocop so if they have had experience with those I get it.
A person just as opinionated as the tool. People who have very strong opinions about formatting in any direction are suspect.
I do not have any opinion on formatting. My argument is that nobody should.
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My issue with your comment is not that it seems to offer unsolicited psychological advice completely out of the blue; it's that it leaves me with an uncanny feeling that it was written by an LLM.
In a thread where I complain about the de-humanisation of my profession by the bots, the irony of having a bot's psychological advice (and so, de-humanising the discussion too) is not lost on me.
If you are really concerned about my being a bot, a quick look at my comment history, going back over a decade, should dispel that concern.
Edit: I once had someone apply for a job and their written communication was pretty caustic. After rejecting their application, I wrote and explained how unprofessional I found their interactions, encouraging them to step back and reconsider how their communication appears from the other side.
To my great surprise, they wrote back and said they had never had anyone give them such feedback and they agreed with my assessment of their interactions. They just had never seen it before. They thanked me for the feedback.
Such interactions are exceedingly rare. But I sometimes offer unsolicited advice on the off chance that said advice can make a difference.
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FWIW, ruff sees your line comment and keeps each item on its line. It only adds a trailing comma and additional space.
It also does not collapse lines when there’s a trailing comma.
Your output seems to be from black. IMO it’s insane to collapse lines when there are line comments.
(I intentionally switched to double quotes since that really is a stylistic choice in Python, you can escape in both, and if you use double quotes inside of single quotes ruff leaves it as-is)
(am not the GP)
I personally like double quotes, because in so many other languages they are for strings, while single quotes are often for other things. But somehow many people have a single quotes obsession in Python. I am guessing, that it is because of ease of typing them on a US keyboard layout.
> many people have a single quotes obsession
Not my problem. My problem is that I want to use them both, as I've been able to for many years.
I'll always use double to surround "can't" and single to surround '8.5" x 14"'. I'll use a context-appropriate pair when adding to existing code. But for all the other cases, I don't want to expend any energy on this. It's a complete non-issue.
> ease of typing them on a US keyboard layout
On both the US and European keyboards single-quotes are easier: no need to press Shift.
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Those tools actually save team energy. Without them any programmer has different opinion on formating, code quality, what is readable etc. You can discuss it endlesly or you can just use ruff.
We can replace the endless and useless discussion on how to format code with an endless and useless discussion on what linting tool to use.
Another option would be to leave both topics alone and go on with our lives, improving the product, fixing bugs, implementing new features, and generally giving customers a better product and shareholders more value, while respectfully agreeing to disagree on the issues of style.
People tend to use tools set up in CICD and/or precommit. Without rules everyone uses their tool and is unwilling to compromise. Even if they are willing it is hard to setup tools to do exactly what you want. Default configuration is always the way.
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> We can replace the endless and useless discussion on how to format code with an endless and useless discussion on what linting tool to use.
That is why gofmt is so great. As the saying goes: gofmt’s style is nobody’s favorite, yet gofmt is everybody’s favorite.
I have never discussed code formatting and drive-by changes more than in projects with auto formatters.
Why though? I've yet to come across an auto formatter that formats things the way I personally like. But that's fine. I do whatever the hell I want until I'm ready to open a PR, then bang it through the auto formatter. And you know what? I can also go the other direction and run a home-brew auto formatter to reshape things the way I personally want on my local machine.
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Gods forbid I talk to people I work with, learn their preferences, and figure out the way we can accommodate each other. Sounds like such a waste of energy. It’s so much better if we all acquiesce to the preferences of some people neither of works with!
How does that work when hundreds of people are working on a project, with a few new people joining every week?
It boggles me that anyone would argue against standardization, or believe that “just get hundreds of people to agree today and tomorrow and every future day” is a better solution.
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You can still talk to them about more important problems than placement of collons and closing bracket.
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It’s because you forgot a comma after the last item. If you had kept that the items wouldn’t have been compacted (at least in black, I’ve stopped linking my code because it breaks intends of formatting more often than it helps)
Sorry, but I did not "forg[e]t a comma after the last item". I intentionally did not put a comma there. The list of the "important numbers" in my example is already complete and perfect, and is not supposed to ever change. I wanted to emphasise this fact by specifically omitting the comma there, in the hope that intelligent people in the future would get this message exactly as I intended for it to be.
I think all of us have worked on code that other people thought was perfect or will never change. Personally I love this rule because it saves me from looking at one extra commit (adding the comma when the next value gets added) when I'm trying dig through line history.
The trailing comma rule is to avoid errors when devs copy/paste a line or dump a new line at the end. This matters particularly for arrays in languages with implicit string concatenation, where the missing comma won't trigger a compile error.
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You will find that pretty much every rule we have in any possible context will have some exceptions that are justified under some conditions.
Taking that as a reason to not have those rules in the first place seems like a logical fallacy that intelligent people should not make.
Must be nice to write code with the hopes that only intelligent people will read it.
[flagged]
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This seems like a strange hill to die on. Linters don’t consume energy, that’s the entire point. They get everyone on the same standard so that no energy is wasted by anyone on having to discuss, debate, and implement these standards. And yes, there are instances where someone’s non-standard coding style is not a problem. But there are instances where it absolutely can be, and these tools help there.
I’m also not sure I understand the “ My place used pylint, flake8, black, ruff -- with hundreds of commits on every change”. These tools don’t add extra commits. You run them prior to your PR, get them aligned with the linting, and then commit the change you were already going to make. Thats 0 extra commits.
For someone ultimately arguing that there is too much effort spent on people’s coding styles, you are spending a lot of effort arguing about people’s coding styles. These tools are some of the most set it and forget it things around.
> These tools don’t add extra commits.
When you replace tool x with tool y, you need to fix your code, because these tools do not agree on what your code should look like, and what was acceptable for tool x simply isn't for tool y.
One of these changes I mentioned brought a massive reformatting of all code base, as the new tool failed 'import' statements unless they were in alphabetical order.
If you change the formatter for your project then yes, you have a single commit where you reformat your project and then commit this.
A single commit after a tool change. I don't see the problem.
Sounds like the issue is not the tools themselves, but that the project management / stewardship allows someone to replace tools willy-nilly leaving others to pay the cost of migration?
At $WORK we have "code guardians" whose responsibility is do to this kind of migrations strategically in the background. The intent is that most other developers should not need to do any (or very little) extra work beyond the task they are actively working on.
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The actual rules are less important, only the consistency of applying them is.
I find that people who argue against automatic linting and formatting tend to be the same that would argue incessantly about style. So much wasted energy, I want none of that.
Also, in your example above, if you put the comment on the line _above_ instead of inline the formatter will most likely do the right thing.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
TIL I am divine!
By the way, you have the exact energy of someone who would argue about code style: a prima donna who quotes Emerson when confronted with disagreement.
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> The actual problems in the code I work with are not the spaces at the end of line or imports in non-alphabetic order, it's the 10-line list comprehensions that are so long that they're impossible for me to parse.
100%. Almost all of my time burned navigating code is not hung up on stylistic conventions but on nasty services with inconsistent abstractions and patterns.
BUT, conventions and consistency make code easier to read and write, period. If you’re debating over single or double quotes that’s almost a fireable offense IMO.
Additionally, when you have a culture that delegates to tools as much as possible, the focus sharpens in a healthy way.
> it's the 10-line list comprehensions
I feel for you both working with straw men day to day. I’ve worked mainly in Python for two decades and have neither seen such a thing nor considered, even to be a bastard, doing such a thing.
You may do as you like in your projects. You might even find you can make a formatter enforce that rule which is apparently important to you.
But one thing I bring to every team is this: “I don’t want to look at a file and say that is Tom’s code or that is your code. What I want to see is [project name] code.”
You want to be a cog wheel, in a company of cog wheels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I want to be an artist, and preferably in a company of artists, having been in a company of cog wheels too many times. Not only it's more fun that way, but also tends to lead to better outcomes.
That's an uncharitable take and I urge you to reconsider. I also take great joy and pride in the art of writing beautiful code. I have no desire to be a cog in a machine. However, my ADHD brain is delighted to not have to make a million little distracting decisions in place of the code planning I should be doing. Formatters let me concentrate on writing the best data structures and APIs and algorithms instead of how many spaces to put before comment markers or while kind of quote mark is more aesthetically pleasing in this particular file.
I, too, want to be an artist. For me, the flow of data through my work is the artistry, not the typography of the code.
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Wowsers. As what I think is a fellow traveler, I would encourage you to look back at all the places you created art and ask how many friends you made at each stop.
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Stylistically ugly code that is globally consistent (ideally across the entire ecosystem) >> locally beautiful code that is inconsistent with the rest of the codebase / up to authors taste. No one likes black formatting, but it’s at least consistent. “Your car can be any color you like as long as it’s black”
With regards to your example, adding a comma to the final element should preserve multi-line. You just don’t know the formatting rules yet apparently
Oh man, list comprehensions, that's me. I get inspired, caught up in the flow, write some eldritch horror of a LC. 30 seconds later "What in the name of saint Lovecraft does this even do?" (sighs) Rewrite as a loop. I mean, I guess they are fine in small doses, very small doses, But boy do they read poorly compared to the rest of Python.
I also need something to save me from my regexps, the verbose flag helps a lot. but what would be really nice is some sort of python subset that could compile to the state machine. I would also like composable expressions, that is, composable at the graph level not the string composition we are forced to use. And a pony, I would also like a pony.
As you can tell I am not a fan of APL, not because of what it can do but because of the super compressed syntax it adopts. see also: perl
Put a comma after "'z': 2" and it will work how you expect, fyi
Ruff/black support and enforce this. Just do ‘'z': 2,’
If you add an extra dangling comma at the end of the last item, ruff/black will auto-format to the line-by-line style you like.
Yep. So far I have found every auto-formatter tool to be hopelessly naive in its workings. No, sorry, I do not want my logger call to stretch over 5 lines of screen real estate, just because the silly tool doesn't allow to distinguish between logger calls and other stuff, and a log message can be > 80 characters. They often make code less readable than before. I am still traumatized from adding trailing comma to every multi-line call, due to black being "opinionated" and always moving things back to one line, making them less readable, if they are not longer than some limit. It's silly.
The other commenters seem to be commenting on style consistency but ignoring your example. Your original format is far easier to read and understand plus the meaning of the comment is lost. IMO you're completely right about this example. Single line dict definitions shouldn't exist. Dicts are far easier to understand and manage when each key/value pair is on its own line, regardless of length.
IIRC, if you put a trailing comma on the last entry, the formatter will keep multiline dicts multiline.
Thank you, but I'm afraid I disagree. Single line dict definitions are fine when that's my intent, multilines are also fine when that is, and I trust myself to know when to use one or the other. My problem is with arbitrary rules like "only x-line dict definitions are allowed," for any value of x.
Yeah, you've ruffled the feathers of people who've been conditioned to strive for uniformity through conformity. Alas you're tilting at windmills in this age of automatic code generation where people look at the general shape of the code and check its intent by running it.
Nobody even addressed the other issue you expressed about uncomprehensible code being fine for linters as long as it conforms to the style guide or low-hanging fruit of "don't use this deprecated method". Who knows, maybe soon enough someone will make a dev tool which runs per file, acknowledges your clever little piece of code and then yells at you that nowadays programming is a team sport called software engineering.
Personally it saddens me that I must agree with the other commenters even if I see where you're coming from. The mass produced, assembly-line with snazzy pipelines took over from the workshop in a wood shed style approach and code linters among other dev tools slot in much better in the former type of workflows than the latter. On one hand I want to be trusted to format my own code according to my intentions but it seems the majority has decided that this is a waste of time, needless bikeshedding and so on. I've begrudgingly gave in for the sake of collaboration which is more important to me in the grand scheme of things.
I guess the upside remains we're still free to do as we please on our own projects. Now to find similar thinking people huddling around Sublime Text shunning linters is not gonna be a cakewalk these days.
I'm surprised a formatter does that. Prettier in the JS world likes to jam destructured arguments onto one line, but it will leave them alone if there's a comment.
this is why i like golang these sorts of things just don't matter, go fmt move on with life.
I agree with you, but that is literally what ruff is meant to do, and what this person is arguing against.
Same for rustfmt.
I love gofmt, rustfmt, ruff.
Yes sure, but the point of something like ruff is that you don't even think about formatting anymore. It is just done for you and it is done consistently.
The "bad" code is actually bad imho. The comment explains intent inside the object rather than on the spec, which makes it easy to miss and harder to discover later.
This seems like a case where the tooling is compensating for unclear conventions. Collaboration tools are useful, but it may be more effective to strengthen the code specifications and documentation practices first, so intent lives in a predictable place instead of being scattered through implementation details.
It's funny to see this comment about Python, which was designed to be a style North Korea. Maybe in a decade we'll see a Go linter and have a good laugh at that.